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The Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability CAoS

Hosted by UCL Anthropology
The Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAoS) is a research centre that draws together the wide range of work of international excellence on questions related to the notion of social, cultural and environmental sustainability. Anthropology at UCL, with its four-field approach (social, biological, medical, material), has a unique contribution to make towards research in sustainability, and towards integrating multidisciplinary studies on ways of living that do not damage the ecological systems of which we are part, and on which we depend for survival. Our research focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability: on local and global understandings of the concept and on lived practices around the world.

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Dr Jerome Lewis is an Associate Professor at UCL Anthropology and established the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAoS) in 2013. CAoS’s inaugural conference in 2015 brought together a host of anthropological luminaries to reflect on what sustainability means from a global cross-cultural perspective.  The rich reflections published in 2017 provided Jerome with the inspiration to develop the concept of Flourishing Diversity as an effective way to solve key ecological and ethical crises facing humanity in the Anthropocene. In 2018 CAoS won the Newton Prize for Brazil with the indigenous organisation CTI, Guarani and Ashaninka peoples of the Atlantic and Amazon forests. In 2019, CAoS’s work promoting environmental justice and social sustainability in the Congo Basin was part of 100 disruptive discoveries #MadeAtUCL.

Learning points

  • Why is it necessary to incorporate the principle of diversity into the concept of sustainability if we are to address the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene?
  • How do conditions of resilience and vulnerability shape the possibilities of sustainable lives and resource use?
  • What kind of interdisciplinary approaches does an Anthropology of Sustainability make possible and necessary?

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